BASIC's question mark and PRINT

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: BASIC's question mark and PRINT
>   From: Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net>
>   Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:03:31 -0600
>     To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>tim lindner wrote:
>> In BASIC, where did the short cut of '?' for PRINT originate?
>> 
>> After following a discussion on the CoCo list I thought I'd ask here.
>> 
>
>Here are some bounds and data points.
>
>The Dartmouth BASIC specification does not have ? as an abbrevation (circa 1964).
>
>I think all versions of Microsoft BASIC have this shortcut (circa 1975).
>
>Palo Alto Tiny BASIC (li chen wang) didn't use this convention -- instead it 
>used "P.".
>
>Wang BASIC (circa 1972) didn't use this convention.
>
> From what I can tell, DEC BASIC didn't use this abbreviation.

The ? was adopted by convention from the fact that early MS basic 
(MITS BASIC) the ? was also the same value as the token for print.
Most of the non-compiled 8bit basics were tokenized in memory for 
execution and storage and when "LIST"ed were detokenized to list as 
Basic we know.

Allison